taozero.com

This album came out of left-field and hit me like a brick wall.

A surprising and beautiful new album by Daniela and Ben Spektor, after a promising debut by Daniela last year. Deep and moving, “Love is” is a brilliant combination of Daniela’s sweet vocals and folk acoustics with Ben’s ambient electronic harmonies. The result is an engaging reflection on love and partnership, packed with hypnotic patterns of electro-pop rhythms and dance beats.

Its a rare event having an album where each song is competing for the “best one”. The first single released to the radio is “Cut it out” – but each of the other tracks is as good.

The sound of this album does not give any hint to the fact that the two live in Israel – this could have been easily a Seattle or a London production. Ranging from the acoustic vocals in “Home” that are almost taken from a Mohave 3 or Mazzy Star album, to the metallic dance beats in the track “Love is”, which sound to me like a love song the Cylon babes in Battlestar Gallactica would dance to.

“Love is” is distributed through BandCamp.com (and iLoveMusic.co.il in Hebrew). It was quite refreshing to see a site that makes is easy for artists selling their music directly to fans, with no fat labels getting in the way. BandCamp takes 15% of the revenue, and all the rest goes directly to the artist. This is a much better deal than the 30% taken by iTunes or Amazon (as far as I remember).

On top of that, the buyer can specify how much he is willing to pay. “Pay what you want” is a disruptive model, pioneered by Radiohead long ago (and later abandoned). Daniela and Ben set the minimum price to 25 NIS (~$7) – but this album deserves much, much more.

Ariel